Thousands of fans from around the world visit Satchmo's Queens home

Published 12:56 am, Sunday, November 21, 2010

The kitchen in the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens. (Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum)

The kitchen in the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens. (Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum)

Photo: Courtesy Of The Louis Armstrong House Museum

A Louis Armstrong pilgrimage

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QUEENS -- Inside the modest red-brick house on 107th Street in a blue-collar neighborhood of Queens, the two bathrooms are the most commodious rooms in the place.

They are outsized and dazzling lavatories that gleam with carved marble sinks, gold-plated plumbing, rococo lighting fixtures and acres of mirrors.

The home's owner, Louis Armstrong, a global ambassador of jazz, spent a lot of time sitting on the throne.

Satchmo could not only scat. It turns out he was gleefully scatological.

"Louis was a health freak. And don't even get me started on that Swiss Kriss he always passed out," said Selma Heraldo, 87, who's lived next door to the Armstrong house her entire life, dishing funny and heartwarming stories about the man who lived here from 1943 until his death after a heart attack in the second-floor master bedroom on July 6, 1971, at age 69.

More Information

If you go

What: Louis Armstrong House Museum

Where: 34-56 107th St., Corona, Queens

When: Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Fri., and noon-5 p.m. Sat. & Sun.

Cost: Admission is $8 for adults, $6 seniors and children and free for kids under 4.

Info: http://www.louisarmstronghouse.org

To see a video: Go to http://www.timesunion.com

Miss Selma, as she's known, worked in a Manhattan brassiere factory, never married and cared for her late mother, Adele, also a close friend of the Armstrongs. Selma spent three years on the road with the Armstrongs as his wife Lucille's traveling companion from 1949 to 1952.

After weeks of urging by the jazz legend, she finally tried Swiss Kriss, his favored herbal laxative, just once. She was traveling with the musician's entourage by bus on a concert swing through the Deep South and Heraldo was assigned a room with a shared toilet down the hall.

"I had to keep running down the hall, but sometimes there was someone else in the bathroom, so I had to wait. I gave Louis hell for that," she recalled with a guffaw.

Heraldo is a feisty, wisecracking unofficial tour guide who walks a dozen paces most days from her house to greet folks at the Louis Armstrong House Museum. The site, administered by Queens College, draws more than 10,000 visitors from around the world each year to an unpretentious and well-preserved shrine to the world's most influential jazz musician. He recorded and composed hit songs across five decades, appeared in more than 30 films, wrote two autobiographies and became one of the most famous figures among the 20th century's entertainers.

Armstrong's garage is now the gift shop, where Swiss Kriss is sold for $6.95 a box, along with a less unorthodox assortment of souvenir books, CDs, T-shirts and trinkets featuring the grinning, round-cheeked, bug-eyed iconic visage.

Armstrong was a fanatic about regularity, possessed a highly refined knowledge of laxatives, wrote in vivid detail about his bowel movements and passed out Swiss Kriss to friends, fans and even the royal family of England. He distributed Swiss Kriss with a chortle and an admonition: "Leave it all behind ya!"

A visitor to the house learns not only of Armstrong's legendary skills as a trumpet player and the musical force of nature he became, but also about his earthy sense of humor and the simple joys of his humble life in the Corona section of Queens, where he returned for brief stretches of R&R after a grueling touring schedule of 300 gigs a year.

He puttered in an Asian-inspired garden where koi drifted lazily in a rock-lined pond. He played with his Schnauzers, Trinket and Trumpet. He shot pool in a rec room with his buddy and neighbor Dizzy Gillespie (who lived around the corner on 106th Street). He loved to sit on his front stoop and practice the trumpet, surrounded by a knot of neighborhood kids.

This is where Pops could kick back out of the limelight, where he didn't have to mop his brow with a signature white handkerchief or ham it up for an audience. Neighbors gave him his space here. Even today, his legacy commands respect in a gritty, predominantly Dominican neighborhood where blaring rap mixes with merengue in the streets. Not a single graffiti tag mars a long brick wall around Armstrong's garden in a residential-commercial stretch, where a plate of red beans and rice (Armstrong's favorite meal) is still served in nearby luncheonettes for less than $5.

On a recent afternoon, Don Arnold, an Albany jazz aficionado and trumpet player, made his first visit. For the pilgrimage, he chose a vintage shirt and blazer, as well as a precise reproduction by Art Fawcett of Dan O'Connell's fedora, in a camel color with a distinctive top crease.

"I'm a really big fan of Louis Armstrong and I've always wanted to come here," said Arnold, 42, a former Democratic committeeman who works for Catholic Charities helping homeless people find housing. He spends his spare time practicing the trumpet and perfecting a spot-on imitation of Satchmo's gravelly, syncopated vocal stylings on "Hello, Dolly," and other Armstrong hits.

After the tour, Arnold huddled with Heraldo, peppering her with arcane questions that belied his scholarly knowledge of all things Armstrong.

"It was an amazing afternoon and a fascinating visit," Arnold said. "I learned a few new things about him and was most impressed to see how devoted Armstrong was as an archivist."

That's a polite way of describing Armstrong the protean packrat.

At a desk in a dark-panelled den where Armstrong spent even more time than on the commode, there are facsimiles of handwritten logs of his home recordings. Two reel-to-reel tape recorders sit in built-in shelving where he stored a collection of 650 homemade tapes, along with cross-referenced handwritten binders of playlists he scrawled in green ink. He rolled tape often for fun. Several home recordings are played during the tour and they invariably end with Armstrong's deep chortle.

Pops laughed the way he blew his horn. Straight from the heart.

A frequent visitor to the house is Tony Bennett, who showed up alone, in a cab, a few months ago. The two performers were friends, and a Bennett portrait of Armstrong hangs in the den. Satchmo loved the gift. "You out-Rembrandted Rembrandt," he said of Bennett's painting.

Next year, ground will be broken in a vacant lot across the street for a $15 million Armstrong visitors center. For the first time, Armstrong's extensive personal archives, related Armstrong collections and items from the house currently stored off-site at Queens College, will be brought back to 107th Street.

Construction is being funded by city and state agencies and overseen by the state Dormitory Authority. A grand opening of the LEED-certified green building is expected in late 2012.

On this afternoon, three generations of a Dutch family made their way to Armstrong's house. They were celebrating the 50th wedding anniversary of Willem Van Der Stokker and his wife on a weeklong trip to New York City with the couple's daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren.

The Armstrong house topped his list of must-see sites.

Van Der Stokker fell in love with Armstrong's inimitable sound as a trumpet player and singer when he was a boy. He attended an Armstrong concert in Horn, Holland, in 1957 and keeps a 75-CD Armstrong collection in a closet filled with jazz discs at his Amsterdam home.

"It's hard to explain why I love Louis Armstrong's music so much," said Van Der Stokker, a former merchant marine and retired metalworker union leader. "There was just nobody better. His music belongs to the whole world."

Reach Paul Grondahl at 454-5623 or by e-mail at pgrondahl@timesunion.com.